Online catalog holds record number of records

By Joanne
Nesbit News and Information Services

The University Library's
online catalog (MCAT) grew to nearly three million records in early
March.

Established in 1988 with 918,000 records, the following four
years saw a combination of projects, funded in part by the Kellogg
Foundation, lead to the addition of another 1.3 million records of books,
microforms and non-books, including sound recordings, musical scores and
visual materials. About 150,000 new records were added to the database
during each of the past six years.

MCAT is part of MIRLYN, the U-M
Library's NOTIS-based, integrated, online library system that includes a
wide variety of published works in addition to government documents,
dissertations, the records of the Bentley Historical Library, the
U-M-Flint Library (FLNT), the records of the Center for Research Libraries
and the ability to connect to holdings at other university libraries.
Without leaving MIRLYN, U-M users can browse the catalogs of the Michigan
Research Libraries Triangle, which includes U-M, Michigan State and Wayne
State universities. Also accessible are the catalogs of the Committee on
Institutional Cooperation, comprised of the Big Ten schools plus the
University of Chicago.

MIRLYN has more than nine million
bibliographic citation records in 13 databases including the Modern
Languages Association Bibliography, the Wilson indexes, and the MathSci
database. The citations link to holdings in the online catalog where
standard numbering schemes are present.

The MIRLYN database
(excluding remote catalogs and indexes) contained 12,890,298 records as of
March 31. Of these records, 3,031,409 were in MCAT.

Computers
connected to the Internet can access MIRLYN directly if they have Telnet
software. The Telnet address is MIRLYN.TELNET.LIB.UMICH.EDU.